From the monthly archives:

October 2009

If Washington Developed Your Strategy?

10.30.2009

What happens when your team gets together to discuss strategy? Do you make clear decisions?
Earlier this week there was a great post blog post on Entrepreneur.com by Tim Berry. Tim is one of my favorite bloggers about entrepreneurship and startups. This post was titled 5 Simple Obvious Truths About Business Strategy. Simple? Yes. Obvious? Not [...]

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Silver Lining : Entrepreneurship in a Difficult Environment

10.29.2009

Many people think the economy is improving. The data certainly suggest that this is true. But as often is the case, employment usually lags economic activity. I still get regular emails of people who recently lost their jobs that are thinking about entrepreneurship in this environment. Here’s a great dialogue about entrepreneurship in a difficult [...]

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Reflect to Improve, and Make it a Habit

10.28.2009

How do you get started on the lean journey? Many organizations struggle with how to get started. They see this monumental journey ahead of them and there is so much to do, but where to start? I think a small and simple way to get started is just begin a small and regular practice of [...]

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Learning to Cook (or Focus on the Means)

10.26.2009

If you want to learn how to cook, who do you learn from? You could learn from the restaurant critic with their insight on what’s good and what’s not, or your could learn from a chef, who knows how and why to make the meal.
I received a great question, or more accurately a challenge, from [...]

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Innovation and Rewarding Learning

10.23.2009

Over on the Lean Blog Mark Graban wrote a post titled Innovation Is as Innovation Does? Besides channeling Forrest Gump, this makes a great point. Innovation is an outcome, but without a process we won’t get it. And that process includes culture, skill, systems, methods, and so on.
Mark makes a point about what behavior we [...]

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Observe with purpose

10.22.2009

Direct observation has been an under appreciated aspect of lean for most of its life. It has gotten a lot more attention in recent years, unfortunately this is thanks in part to the use of jargon, such as gemba and genchi genbutsu. For those of you who know me, you know I hate jargon. It [...]

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How Smart Leaders Talk About Time

10.21.2009

How do you talk about time? Time is like money. We invest both time and money. We spend both time and money. We should (although most do neither) budget time and money. We waste both time and money. The only difference between them is that I can always get more money, but once time is [...]

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Idea Management

10.20.2009

I have a new post published on StartUp Blog at PartnerUp. See the full article on that site.
This is a guest post by Jamie Flinchbaugh.

I’ve met a number of people who want to start businesses but have been clawing away at the same idea for many years without progress. I’ve met just as many people [...]

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Value Stream Mapping Font

10.19.2009

I ran across this over the weekend. I was shocked, but also saw how simple this could make working with simple value stream maps on your computer. It’s a font you can download that contains value stream mapping symbols. You can download it for free from Ambor.  
I generally don’t think that people should spend too [...]

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Blog Action Day on Climate Change

10.16.2009

Yesterday was apparently Blog Action Day ‘09 on Climate Change. At my last check, 13,163 blogs are writing about climate change today. With that in mind, I partly want to just leave it at that because there is probably a lot said in 1,000s of blogs already. But I’ll add perhaps a perspective on entrepreneurship. [...]

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